“We were browsing around in the bookstore, and suddenly I heard my daughter calling out, ‘Mama! You have to look at this!’” recalls Cooper. “So, of course, I thought she'd found something she wanted to buy, but it was completely the opposite. She was looking at two books that had made her so enraged she was actually in tears.”She's no shrinking violet, but she bursts into tears at the sight of a book she doesn't like. Right. This is the punchline from the idiot mother: "Unfortunately it triggered a somewhat nasty flurry of comments about censorship, which I feel really distracted from the point of the post."
The books, titled “How To Survive (Almost) Anything,” included a boy version and a girl version. In the boy version, the chapters covered topics such as “How to Survive a Shark Attack,” “How to Survive in a Desert,” and “How to Survive Whitewater Rapids.”
The girl version addressed such issues as “How to Survive a BFF Fight,” “How to Survive a Fashion Disaster,” and “How to Survive a Breakout.”
“The one that got to my daughter the most was ‘How to Survive a Camping Trip’ because she loves camping,” Cooper said. “It was sad to read ‘camping may not always be a girl's top choice of activity, but here's how to make the best of a bad situation and survive in style.’ The picture had a girl dreaming about lounging on a beach. Later it said, ‘Besides, fresh air is excellent for the skin, and a brisk walk is a marvelous workout.’”
KC was so upset at the sexist nature of the books that a bookstore employee took notice and asked her what was wrong.
“After looking through the books, the employee agreed they were offensive and pulled them from the shelves! She said if she had seen them first they wouldn’t have been there to begin with. She was great because she took action and validated my daughter’s feelings.”
Cooper, a science fiction writer, is proud of her daughter for drawing attention to the books and having them removed from the store, and took this experience as a lesson learned for both KC and herself.
No, you mother-from-Hell, censorship is the entire point of the post! And no man in his right mind is ever going to come within 10 feet of that mentally poisoned little girl; she'll be writing wistfully about dinosaur rape, wondering why no boy wants to come within 20 feet of her, and blaming all her problems on sexism by the time she's eighteen. The girl would have been much better off in life if the bookstore employee said: "we don't give a quantum of a damn about your feelings, you little evolutionary dead end; what other people write and what other people read isn't any business of yours."
Equality is the reason you can't have good books.
